The left's secret club plans for 2014, 2016

Some of the country’s biggest Democratic donors — including Tom Steyer and Jonathan Soros — are huddling behind closed doors beginning Sunday in Chicago with union bigwigs and progressive superstars like Bill de Blasio to plan how to pull their party — and the country — to the left.

The setting is the annual spring meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive club of wealthy liberals that’s the closest thing the left has to the vaunted Koch brothers’ political network.

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The DA, as the liberal group is known to insiders, is increasing its ranks of rich donors for the first time in years and is gearing up to spend huge sums on political data, voter registration, ground organizing and advertising to influence the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential elections. Potentially more significant, the groups’ donors also could play an important role in determining whether the post-Barack Obama Democratic Party embraces the rising tide of progressive populism or hews to a more cautious, centrist course — in other words, whether the Hillary Clinton wing or Elizabeth Warren wing will seize the reins.

The Spring Investment Conference will feature a number of Clinton allies and others associated with the centrist wing — including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes and Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. But the conference — which kicks off Sunday night at a Ritz Carlton ballroom with a dinner keynoted by de Blasio — is also seen as a coming out party of sorts for the group’s progressives, who have expressed some measure of dissatisfaction with what they see as a level of timidity on their pet issues from the Obama White House.

According to a conference agenda obtained by POLITICO, panels will focus on elevating progressive issues like income inequality, climate change, drug reform, gun control, abortion rights and the death penalty.

It’s not all serious business, though. Social events include a wine party featuring selections from wineries owned by DA donors, a private curator-led tour of the Art Institute of Chicago and a performance by “The Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead, who the agenda says will deploy her “comedic genius” to take a “light-hearted look at the conservative Right and the decay of the Fourth Estate.”

DA conferences are typically kept hush-hush, with locations tightly held, press barred from the sessions and participants prohibited from discussing the proceedings.

Invitations are coveted by all manner of Democrats. Several representatives from Obama’s orbit are expected at the Ritz, including White House Political Director David Simas and campaign adman Larry Grisolano. They’re participating in a panel on winning health care strategies in state races, while Organizing for Action, the nonprofit group formed from the remnants of Obama’s campaign to push his second-term agenda, is hosting donors for an open house at its headquarters. And former Obama political guru David Axelrod is slated to deliver a speech titled “Reflections on a Career in Journalism, Politics, and the Obama Journey.”

The courting of rich Democrats in Chicago comes as some of the party’s top names continue a discordant character assault on major conservative donors as eroding the very fabric of American democracy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has repeatedly blasted the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch as “un-American” and accused them of “actually trying to buy the country.”

Democracy Alliance partners, as the group calls its members, pay annual dues of $30,000 and are required to contribute a total of at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. Since its inception in 2005, the DA has steered upward of $500 million to a range of groups, including pillars of the political left such as the conservative media watchdog Media Matters, the policy advocacy outfit Center for American Progress and the data firm Catalist — all of which are run by Clinton allies.

While those groups will be represented in Chicago, DA insiders and observers are watching the conference closely for signs of a leftward tack away from the Democratic Party’s strategy.

Steyer, the San Francisco hedge fund billionaire trying to raise money for a planned $100-million midterm spending spree on behalf of environmentally minded candidates, is hosting a session called “Putting Climate Change at the Forefront of American Politics,” and is expected to hold one-on-one meetings to solicit checks from interested DA partners.

And the conference will mark the beginning of a new DA leadership regime that is replacing the Obama and Clinton loyalists who had been running the organization.

“I anticipate the Democracy Alliance becoming both more progressive and more aggressive in the coming years,” said Erica Payne, who helped found the club, and now runs the Agenda Project, a progressive communications nonprofit. “That will disturb centrist Democrats, but it will be healthy and productive for the country. They need to be challenged on these things.”

And in June, the board is expected to elect a new chair to replace Rob McKay, an heir to a Taco Bell fortune who has been chair since 2006. McKay, an early Obama supporter, sat on the board of Priorities USA, the super PAC that boosted Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and this year switched its allegiances to Clinton in advance of a hoped-for 2016 presidential campaign.

National Education Association executive John Stocks, is among the leading candidates to replace McKay, DA sources say, and would be the group’s first chair who is not a major donor and who hails from organized labor.